The Natural Child: What does the title mean to you?

07-28-2008, 07:16 AM

Hello Everyone,

To get us excited about reading, I thought I'd start a thread on just thinking about the title "The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart". When you read this and hear it in your mind, what images does it evoke? What expectations of what you're going to read come to mind? What appeals to you in the title?

For me, I am captivated by the phrase "from the heart". To me, this means that the book will hopefully remind me that I know how to be a mom from the inside out. The terms "natural child" evoke to me my child running through a meadow with a flower in her mouth as she smiles and runs with joy as I am not too far behind enjoying her moment as well as mine. It also evokes to me as well as that my daughter will have her "inside out" path that will be taken along with me.

I am truly looking forward to reading this book as well as having the opportunity to chat with Jan Hunt!

I am so excited to be studying this book again - it was one of the very first that I read when I started my AP journey three years ago!

I love the title of this book - it reminds me of something a very wise friend told me once. I was fretting over my daughter's obsession with dolls, despite my best efforts to keep her playthings gender-neutral. She told me that the job of a conscious parent is not to control who our children become (i.e., a feminist), but to identify what their natural inclinations are and help them to be the best "them" they can become. So what this title means to me is that parenting from the heart is helping our children to figure out who they naturally are, and helping them to cultivate those qualities!